UPDATE August 22,2011: I have had great stable results with the 56Mbps patch setting for 1080/24p and also 720/60p. Auto Quantizer Details set to 4-All to Details for 1080/24p and 720/60p. Patch is not stable in 1080/60i, don’t even try it Hopefully we will have a fix for this soon.

I think we may have a solid Canon EOS 5D MK2 video rival on our hands with the newly released Panasonic GH2 PTool v3.62d patch by Vitaliy Kiselev and Chris Brandin. For still images the much larger Canon sensor is still clearly superior. Your donations helped make this incredible new version possible, so please keep the donation pool flowing. This update took only a couple of weeks to release…donations do help 

Reader Lars in Berlin, kindly informed me of the new patch release, and I quickly had to try it out today. Yes, everything works as promised and PTool v3.62d is completely stable on my NTSC GH2 using the 42Mbps patch for 1080/24p and 720/60p with the 14-140mm lens and Sandisk Extreme Pro 45MB/sec card. I shot for 30 minutes in 1080/24p and 720/60p, zooming in and out on the family cat and other moving targets, at all the GH2 native ISO’s of 160, 320, 640, 1250, and 2500. Shutter speeds were the standard 180 degree shutter or 1/50th and 1/125 as it is commonly referred to in cinema circles.

Lars just post this very delicious 42Mbps short film. Very well done

Here is a particular lovely video shot by mpgxsvcd using the GH2 42Mbps patch. Be sure to download the original 1080/24p file, it looks superb.

My custom gamma setting for maximum video dynamic range are the “smooth” setting with the additional -2, -2, -2, -2 in the drop down menu, GH2 folks know what I mean

OK, what is so fabulous and new with the latest PTool v3.62d patch? First off, the video quality in the shadow regions is now just stellar. My quick test demonstrated that ISO 1250 looks better than ISO 160 in the default Panasonic factory firmware. The little “blip” we saw in the first second of video in the previous 42Mbps PTool v3.61d patch is now fixed

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